---
title: "Interpreting and Generating Indirect Answers — Green 1999"
description: "In conversation, people often answer yes-no questions without saying \"yes\" or \"no.\" The questioner then has to work out the answer through conversational…"
authors: ["Nancy Green", "Sandra Carberry"]
year: 1999
source: "https://aclanthology.org/J99-3004/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/green-1999-interpreting-generating-indirect-answers/"
---
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# Interpreting and Generating Indirect Answers

**Authors:** [Nancy Green](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/nancy-green/), [Sandra Carberry](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/sandra-carberry/) · **Year:** 1999 · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/J99-3004/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/J99-3004.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1581361409)

**Citations:** 27 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [12](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
In conversation, people often answer yes-no questions without saying "yes" or "no." The questioner then has to work out the answer through conversational implicature. Green and Carberry built a computational model, implemented in Common LISP, that both understands and produces such indirect answers in English. Their central idea is that a responder plans a full answer, made up of a direct reply (the nucleus) plus supporting material (satellites), but may voice only part of it. Interpreting an indirect answer therefore means recognizing that plan, and generating one means constructing it. Shared discourse plan operators encode answering strategies. Within them, coherence relations describe which kinds of satellites can accompany each answer type, and stimulus conditions capture why a speaker would add one. During generation, the system runs its own interpreter to check which parts the hearer could infer, so those parts can be left unsaid. The model covers multi-sentence and varied indirect answers and extends plan-based theories of implicature. This is useful for building robust, polite dialogue systems.

## Key points
- The motivating data comes from Stenström's study of 25 conversations. In that study, 13% of responses to polar questions and 7% of responses to confirmation requests were indirect.
- The model draws on three sources:
  - SRI (1992) transcripts of telephone dialogues between travel agents and clients
  - examples from earlier literature, such as Hirschberg, Levinson and Brown & Levinson
  - constructed examples
- The interpreter returns alternative discourse plans ranked by plausibility. The generator outputs a full-answer plan that marks which parts are inferable. Hypothesis generation handles responses that omit more than just the nucleus.
- The authors give three reasons a speaker might answer indirectly: politeness, efficiency (heading off a likely follow-up question), and avoiding a misleading bare yes or no.
- An evaluation experiment used a 19-item blocks-world questionnaire of question–response pairs. The implementation relied on a Horn clause theorem prover (Chester 1980).

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [Discourse analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/discourse-analysis/) · [Implicature](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/implicature/)

## Cited by

Cited by

12 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 5 of them have a page here, 7 not yet.

- ["I'll be there for you": The One with Understanding Indirect Answers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/damgaard-2021-i-ll-be-there-you/)
- ["I'd rather just go to bed": Understanding Indirect Answers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/louis-2020-i-d-rather-just-go/)
- [Was It Good? It Was Provocative.” Learning the Meaning of Scalar Adjectives](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/marneffe-2010-was-it-good-it-was/)
- [Disentangling Indirect Answers to Yes-No Questions in Real Conversations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/sanagavarapu-2022-disentangling-indirect-answers-yes-no/)
- [Reasoning Requirements for Indirect Speech Act Interpretation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/sarathy-2020-reasoning-requirements-indirect-speech-act/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{green1999interpreting,
  title = {{Interpreting and Generating Indirect Answers}},
  author = {Green, Nancy and Carberry, Sandra},
  year = {1999},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J99-3004/}
}
```

- [← previous Improved Alignment Models for Statistical Machine Translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/och-1999-improved-alignment-models-statistical-machine/)
- [next → Noun Phrase Coreference as Clustering](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/cardie-1999-noun-phrase-coreference-as-clustering/)
- [↑ back to papers of 1999](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/1999/)

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45 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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